'Humble Pie' On Data Issues For Hinsdale D86: Official

DARIEN, IL – Hinsdale High School District 86 officials have long complained about the costs of public records requests. The district appears to get more than comparable school systems.

But school board member Bobby Fischer this week acknowledged getting a serving of "humble pie" in analyzing data to measure disparities in course selection between Central and South high schools.

Fischer, who has expressed concern with the expense of handling Freedom of Information Act requests, said past records requests have helped the district lately.

"The FOIAs really did save us because they provided us the last eight years of course denials and course demand," Fischer said at a school board meeting. "So it turns out a lot of these FOIAs are really helping the district solve some problems here."

At the meeting, he did not identify the residents whose requests were useful. Residents such as Kim Notaro, Alan Hruby and Adolph Galinski are among those who have sought information about course selection.

As it is, the school district's software cannot produce information for specific times during the past for course selection-related issues, officials said. This week, the board's president, Catherine Greenspon, said the lack of data was a big problem and that officials manipulated numbers given to the board and the public.

Fischer heads the ad hoc Availability and Opportunities Committee, which has been analyzing course selection for months. What he said at this week's school board meeting largely reflected his comments at a committee session a few weeks ago.

"Our major goal is to track course offerings, course requests and enrollment across both campuses to better inform scheduling decisions and to ensure equitable access to courses," he said. "Once complete, we feel like the course data set should be posted on the District 86 website in a forward-facing way a few times per year."

He said the district offers courses that do not run. Eight of them, he said, haven't run in more than three years.

"There are five courses that haven't run consistently, and when they run, they run well below our staffing framework. They end up being very expensive courses to run," Fischer said.

He said the district has eliminated 10 courses that continue to appear in the program of studies.

In some cases, courses run at one school but not the other. For example, the Personal Relationships course is run at Central, but has never run at South, Fischer said, adding that such situations contribute to the inequity that officials worry about.

A way to address that situation, he said, is to run particular courses on even years at one school and odd years at the other. That could be done, for instance, for Music Theory, which runs at Central but not at South, he said.

"Parents would be able to plan for that," he said.

Some courses in the program of studies are largely redundant, Fischer said. Similar courses could be combined, taking the best of each, he said.